I went through a phase of  scrutinizing a few entries from a contest for designing a “contents page” for a tech magazine. Some of the worst entries had a  pathetic color scheme. With hot pink texts on dirty green and black background made my mind shutdown for a while. I then decided to post something that would help inexperienced color pickers.  Be it good typography or design, its always underpinned with the proper use of colors. Color combinations like these are pleasing to the eye:

Getting such a great sense of color demands great experience. Still some places on the web help us generating new colored ideas. Some of the tools which help finding a perfect color sceme are:

http://www.colorcombos.com/ Personally my favorite place for finding a color scheme for any occasion. This website has a huge gallery of pre-made color arrays. You just have to scan them and pick the best one that suits. There isn’t any hassle of turning knobs or pushing buttons to generate a scheme. On finding a box that is the best for your project, click on it for a full page display with the hex codes. Though the hex codes are within the box in the library itself. But having a look at the colors on a full page helps you decide.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

http://www.colorschemer.com/

and the list goes on…

You would have to look some of these related articles to find great color picking tools on the web.

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The summer heat and the holidays make life boring. The WWW has some fun places buried deep that feature the popular culture and other interesting stuff. It makes passing time much easier. Here I’ve compiled a list of the world’s most engrossing places on the web that can help to while away time like there was none.

Popurls

A huge live list of the best stories around the world. Gets the data from famous social bookmarking websites and the best blogs.

One place for popular links.

Jimmyr

A home made version of popurls started by Jimmy Ruska.

Digg

The most popular social bookmarking website with loads of stuff to discover. Digg introducing some new social features, a sneak peek in the following video:

Cracked

Funny starts here. These people know what’s funny and what’s not. The most experienced humor website on the planet. Must see the funny lists and videos.

Icanhasinternets

No one other than the author of this website knows what the name means. But, its pretty funny to just read it. You’ll wonder where these people get som much LMAO stuff to post daily. Just click the randomizer button on the right pane and have fun.

Funny Or Die

Another Cracked.com styled website. It features loads of original funny videos. Famous for parodies of literally anything in this damned world. Updated daily.

OMGPOP

Play higly addictive multiplayer games here. Even if your despise online flash gaming, its a must chek out (Apparently you are searching for something to pass your time with so no other go. Go to OMGPOP now). Must play Missile command now.

Addictive multiplayers, fast load times, slick OS kind of interface, real players, Facebook integration.

Kongregate

A place where you find the cream of flash games from around the world. You’ll end up spending hours on this website. Some of the games you must try for sure are indestruc2tank, continuity, tower defense games, robot wants puppy, red remover, stacker series, filler and many more. Sign up and level up.

Addictive flash multiplayers, best flash games around, leveling up system, neat design. Nothing more you could ask of a flash games website.

That was the first part. I don’t keep drafting stuff and adding more and more to it before publishing. One sitting should convert at least to one post for me. We’ll see another such list pretty soon before you are done with this one.

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Most of the monitors have a poor contrast with light shades of grey and whites. It gets irritating when you have to find the scrollbar while going through long pages in Chromium browser for Ubuntu. The scrollbar looks something like this before and after the fix.

Before

After

Using Gnome color chooser doesn’t change it in Chromium. The Google Chrome extension specifically for Ubuntu Chromium users helps rectify this problem. Though a lot of incompatibility and crashes are reported in the comments, I had incompatibility wit some sites but no crashes yet. [EXTENTION]

This makes the scrollbar blue like the blue clear looks style. The vivid blue on grey makes spotting it easy on long pages also.

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I hate people coming to me and gasping about the fact that I didn’t listen to a particular “famous” artist’s track. I apparently bear weird musical taste. It isn’t even a bit surprising to see music from genres wide apart landing in my Loved tracks list (pop, metal, alternative, classics,  house, psychedelic trance and what not). I tend to associate random memories with the music I listen. Yes, I maintain an year-wise loved tracks list which parallelly is like a diary for me. My archive folder:

I’ve talked about Last FM and Youtube Disco in my previous posts. 22tracks is something I recently came to know. “22tracks.com is a jukebox consisting of 22 playlists of different genres, each playlist filled with 22 tracks, selected by specialized DJs of Amsterdam . 22tracks provides a quick overview of the latest music, promotes new artists and lets you discover new genres.

Minute but many developments took place when I was NOT blogging in college.

I improved a lot with Photoshop and picked up great techniques in Corel draw. Thanks to my college magazine design buddies Advaith and Mayank. One day after writing an exam I was in a very jolly mood. I couldn’t resist opening Photoshop. I started working from scratch and with my golden iPod nano in front of me. I came out with the following illustration of the iPod Nano

I stopped playing the most loved hostel multiplayer – counterstrike. It was sucking away huge amounts of my time.

I touched the 400 floor in the icytower, could survive till the 422^nd floor. This made my worldwide icytower rank to A. I was the first among my icytower playing crazy friends to achieve this. The following screenshot shows the A rank and the floor 422. To go to the next rank you are supposed to go to 500^th floor. 500 I think is possible. But the 2^nd goal (highlighted) to reach the 400^th floor without combos a little too much.

Started playing Farmville and Mafia-wars just to learn some tricks so I could post it for new players.

Well, when I was away I didn’t stop gathering information to blog about. So I could immediately start writing when I get back. Some of great such new things are waiting to get written and posted. Watch out